The delivery of multimedia (e.g., text, audio, graphics, images, video, television, etc.) has experienced tremendous growth and advances in recent years. For example, cable providers have launched a variety of Video on Demand (VOD) services, where subscribers can select movies to view at a date and time of their liking. As still a further example, subscribers may receive live television feeds or replays of television programming via World Wide Web (WWW) browsers or media players over the Internet.
One problem associated with providing VOD and other multimedia data services on demand, is that bandwidth may quickly be overcome with popular programming or multimedia selections being downloaded. For example, if a movie is hugely popular, then it may be selected by a large number of subscribers to view at roughly the same point in time. This can cause the network to degrade and subscribers may become frustrated with the delays experienced by them in waiting for their desired movie to arrive on their devices or subscribers may be frustrated with interruptions that they may experience if the desired movie is being streamed to multimedia players of the subscribers.
Another problem is that selections may be scheduled for broadcast, such that rather than having to download a selection over the network, the selection could easily be recorded by a subscriber and stored locally for subsequent consumption. However, communicating broadcast schedules or relying on subscribers to set their recording devices for recording at a time of the broadcast is often not practical with current techniques used in the industry. As a result, a selection may have to be repetitively rebroadcast or downloaded before each subscriber desiring the selection has it for viewing.
Moreover, not only is distribution cost a factor for a broadcaster in supplying multimedia on demand, but subscriber satisfaction is also a significant factor for the broadcaster. Subscribers to multimedia may become disgruntled with a provider because performance or response time for desired selections is not acceptable to them. So, customer satisfaction and loyalty can be adversely impacted if selections are not delivered in an acceptable fashion to the subscribers. This may mean that even when a broadcaster resolves its distribution expenses in an acceptable manner that a subscriber may be satisfied with, a previously disgruntled subscriber may be long gone and unlikely to be swayed to return to that broadcaster.